History and Features of HTML 5

Some History of HTML

Features of HTML 5

Separation of main content and navigation
Earlier versions of HTML were not designed with accessibility in mind. Web page designers created some workarounds such as "Skip Navigation" links (similar to "Skip Intro" buttons), which would be placed near the beginning of web pages to allow users "viewing" a site with an HTML screen reader to keep the software from having to vocalize the navigation links on every page.
HTML 5 continues to support XSL style sheets, which allow the navigation and other common elements to be completely removed from the documents with the main content and placed in one or more style sheet documents. The advantages of separating the navigation from the main content include:
  1. making the web pages more accessible, by not forcing screen readers to vocalize all of the navigation links before getting to the main content
  2. centralizing the "look and feel" of the web site using the templates in the style sheet documents
  3. improving page load times, since the style sheet documents can be cached by the browser and downloaded just once as opposed to when the common navigation elements are wrapped around the content and downloaded again and again with every web page
  4. making the web pages more mobile-friendly

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